Field Discovery: jobdreaming

Online social networking is a fickle and mysterious thing, there are days where it seems like nothing in your news feed or RSS or wall or updates or what have you is really all that striking. Maybe it's one of those days where that one article that seemed to go viral a couple weeks ago has found a new group of unitiateds and it's spreading again or maybe it's just a slow news day. There are other days when social networking brings you small treasures like a fresh article on one of your favorite industry sites or a new post from a blogger you're digging at the moment. On the best of days, social networking brings you something new and out of left field, something that gives you a moment of pause and makes you reconsider how you're doing things.

These instances for me tend to focus around technology or branding and identity or something so shiny and web/HR 2.0 that I'm like a one year old on their first birthday tearing into a cake.

I remember back in the day (back when saying back in the day didn't date you) when I first stumbled upon this new thing called a job board. Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder and others - they helped prove the internet was useful. Then came sites like LinkedIn and Spoke and MySpace and the rest of their ilk, they helped (and some still do) show that the internet didn't have to be an isolated experience and that you could "connect" with the people at the job you just applied for courtesy of the job boards. Time marched on, sites came and went, how they worked evolved and shifted, economies and industries crashed and rose again from the ashes. And with every day of every month of every year, human resources evolved with it.

Over the course of my career, and I like to think that I'm still fairly young, it used to be that if you wanted a job you mailed a resume and then if you were fortunate enough to land an interview you completed a paper application - my current employer has a completely paperless recruitment process as do so many others. There was a time that not everyone with a desk job had company email because there was a lack of perceived value, I'd challenge you to show me even a handful of employers that operate in that fashion today. Whereas "job hopping" was a distasteful act even ten years ago, the notion of someone proactively managing their career is now embraced in many corners.

Technology changes, human resources changes, people change and today's little nugget of internet awesome is all about change and managing it for yourself: jobdreaming.

To be clear, I haven't used the employer side of this site yet, but I'm curious to have my team give it a go once we have an opening that fits the site's demographics. What I have done is take the candidate portal for a test run - it takes all of 30 seconds and you basically play a quick game of dream job ad libs. It's quick, it's easy, it's private (no one's going to stumble across your jobdream like they might an online resume), it's non-committal (it's like throwing a quarter in a wishing well), and if you're lucky you get a call from a recruiter - who's been parsed by the site and all that - about a job that may be your next great career step - it's sort of like career matchmaking.

So, take 30 seconds, fill out the shiny form and click submit - you're not signing up for anything, and maybe it will get you thinking about your job, your career, what you do, who you are, and what you want to be when you grow up. Who am I kidding - nobody's growing up around here, we're just getting better at being, doing, thriving, changing, and adapting? Better yet, maybe you've just found the next great resource for your company's recruitment toolkit.